My top favourite flowers

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Just for fun
my top 5
favourite flowers and ARE THEY USEFUL?

Rose
 classic, divine aroma, beautiful, a range of colours, although i love my hybrid tea rose.
Are they useful?  They sure are, mine give some great rose hips, I've yet to sue them but i'm planning on doing exactly that soon.
some of the uses.

Passion Flower
This is a hard one.  there are some amazingly beautiful passion flowers out there but not all the vines produce useful fruit.  The most boring flower is the one that produces our fruit, but wow they can be pretty.  To be fair though, even this boring old version of it is really quite a fascinating flower to look at.

blossoms crab apple/cherry. 
I have a crab apple to get my blossom fix, but cherry blossoms are dear to my heart.  So why don't i have a cherry blossom?  Because a cherry tree is HUGE!  I don't have the room for it.  So i went for a smaller option and i can use the crab apples in crab apple jam/jelly.

Carnations 
 I've always loved the aroma, and I've recently found that they are edible which kind of sky rocketed it them this list.

Australian Bottle Brush
I don't like many of our natives but this is one I've always liked.  as for uses, to my limited knowledge they are perfect for attracting bees...that would be the sun of it, but I've not done research into it either.  Still bees are pretty important.

Plans for next years school fair

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Next year i want to contribute towards the school fair and the best way I can see to do that is hit the tip shop up for jars and tins, and then grab some of the extra plants form my yard.

I've left a strawberry in the patch with the rhubarb hoping it'll propagate itself for that very reason.  I have a succulent that i think already has a few babies and hopefully there will be more next year.  And i'm hoping to learn to propagate rosemary and lavender as well.  I also have these hothouses for growing herbs in, i might put them together and use them to sprout herbs for the stall too.  I'm also wanting to establish an aloe patch in the yard somewhere too which of course will provide babies.

It's a lot to learn in 12 months, because I've always found propagating kind of intimidating and if it's going to be a cost effective I need to be careful.  It's exciting though, the idea of being useful and contributing towards something that really was an extraordinary experience.  Their school fair is quite spectacular.




Wish me luck!

Gecko Block Update Oct 2014

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So spring has sprung and i'm still trying to sort things out here.
There's some good news though.
My peaches and nectarines are growing.  These pictures aren't form my tree  butt his is about the stage they are at.

Peach

Nectarine

They are both suffering from leaf curl unfortunately and I've been pulling the leaves off but that doesn't seem to have helped an awful lot.  Treatment seems to need to be done during the dormant stages so we're enduring it for now and hoping the fruit won't be effected adversely by it.

My apples flowered recently too, they too seem to be showing signs of some issue on their leaves, i need to get it to a nursery to see what they say.  But both the golden delicious and granny smith have flowered, i'm excited to maybe get some fruit from them this year as well. 

Last night at my kids school fair i managed to acquire some more edible options for the garden.

Some African Violets which are going to be repotted soon and take up residence in the bathroom.

Here's some Health benefits of eating violets.  

And I've heard candied violets are good.  Pansies being part of the violet family works too.

And some miniature pansies which i'm going to pot for the back porch area, although i need to look up their sun preferences yet.  But i'm excited to try some of these, and other thing.

Pinterest pansy recipes

Beautiful Delicious Pansy Flower Recipes

I also managed to acquire some geraniums for tge girls, nice and cheap and while not edible, my girls  will appreciate the easy to grow nature of them and their flowers

I'm thinking in  pot maybe or perhaps over on the far side of where i want the drive way to be where they can get nice and big.  Perhaps in a pot t begin with, I have some nice unused big ones that they'd look nice in.

I know they don't fit my usual guidelines for a plant in my garden, they aren't in any way edible but heck we all have to bend and break, even on our own rules sometimes.  These will hopefully get my girls to stop asking to buy flowers simply cos they are pink (mostly cos they already have them) and when they get their Christmas presents, being their own garden beds and tools to work it, maybe i'll be able to steer them to more edible flowers or even veggies.